On this episode, in the wake of India’s 71st anniversary as a republic, we’ll speak about the farmers’ protests that have been raging across the country for more than two months now in opposition to the three farm laws enacted in September 2020. I speak to Shweta Bhattad, a farmer and visual artist, performer, sculptor and founder member of the Gram Art Project collective, a group of farmers, artists, and other members of the community based in her village of Paradsinga in Madhya Pradesh. With a focus on issues of women’s safety, education and the female body, Shweta works with agricultural materials and roots her artistic practice in the context of rural cultivation as a political, social and economic mode of life. She has exhibited widely, including at the Vancouver Biennale in 2014 and at KHOJ, New Delhi in 2017 as part of Evidence Room, a retrospective of a five-year public art initiative called Negotiating Routes: Ecologies of the Byways. Along with her co-founders of the Gram Art Project, Shweta won the FICA Public Art Grant in 2015 for India's first land art festival, the Gram Dhara Chitra Utsav. On today’s episode, we discuss her artistry and farming work as well as the Gram Art Project's initiatives, against the backdrop of the farmers' protests.

Click here to access the time-stamped English language transcript here: https://cutt.ly/PkkDWDf

Credits:

Audio courtesy: Vernouillet by Blue Dot Sessions [CC BY-NC 4.0]

Translation and transcription: Akansha Naredy

Kabir Jhala, 'How an artist-led newspaper in Delhi is helping to organise the 'world's biggest protest', The Art Newspaper, 25 January 2021.

Kamayani Sharma, 'A Good Harvest', Take On Art: Take Ecology, January-June 2017.

Snigdha Poonam. 'Suicide Town', Huffington Post, 1 June 2016.

Vandana Kalra, 'How the farmers' protest found resonance in art', The Indian Express, 17 January 2021.

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, Continuum (London, New York), 2004.